Facebook Strips 200,000 Pages Of Fake ‘Likes’

This article originally appeared on 60 Second Social.

Facebook says it has “new recognition technologies” which have allowed it to triple the number of detected fake likes over the last six months and drive many ‘bad actors’ (third party companies) selling likes, out of business.

Buying likes is not a new phenomenon, in fact it has been around for quite some time now. You find a third party platform selling likes for your Facebook page and you pay them a certain amount of money in return for a certain number of likes on your page. For smaller companies looking for attention, this method can make your page look interactive and engaging on first glance so it has been a relatively popular means of getting up and running for some people.

According to H. Kerem Cevahir, Facebook’s site security engineer, they have removed bogus likes from 200,000 pages since the start of March. Page administrators were notified of the fact and advised on how to “gather authentic fans.”

Facebook regards ‘fake likes’ to be external services which sell so-called ‘like packages’ for a flat fee. When you pay these external services your page gets sent to a click farm where individuals are paid to click like on whatever is put in front of them, or fake accounts that don’t represent real people come and like your page.

However the irony is that when you pay Facebook money to run an advert we know that a lot of your likes come from click farms as well which ultimately means that you end up with little to no engagement and the same deal you would have got from a third party service, it just costs more money on Facebook.

We ran a story on Facebook fraud and fake likes some time ago which you can go back and read here:

Facebook Fraud? Click Farms & Fake Likes

You can also check out this really informative video on Facebook Fraud from Veritasium below.

Granted you can get more interaction from Facebooks official package as opposed to a third party one, however it would be wrong to say that the entire process from Facebook was above board.

About The Author

Mark is the founder of 60 Second Social media where he provides social media news and digital marketing analysis. You can follow him on Twitter here. You can also follow 60 Second Social on Twitter here. Or you can drop Mark an email at, daltomark@me.com